Page 26 of Our Stop

She hadn’t seen him since she’d live-tracked his Uber home on her app, making sure he got back to where he lived before she took the photo of them out of the frame on her bedside table and cut it into tiny little pieces.

She could see him saying something, but she couldn’t hear the words. Her body was ice cold and it felt like not enough air was reaching her lungs. Awful Ben was still moving his mouth. It was like time had frozen and sped up, both at the same time. She blinked several times in quick succession and felt sick and suddenly her tummy hurt.

‘You are in a world of your own,’ he said.

It was weird how he said it. It was an accusation, but also said totally neutrally. It felt aggressive to Nadia, but the woman on his arm – a beautiful, radiant woman, with full cheeks and kind eyes – smiled, as if that must be a private joke between them. What had he said about her? Did this woman on his arm know what he was capable of yet?

‘I … I don’t want to talk to you. Excuse me.’

Nadia pushed past the two of them, stepping out into the road to do so and only narrowly missing a cyclist who screamed at her, ‘Fucking hell! Watch it!’

She heard Awful Ben say something aboutthe ex I told you about, poor thing,and she remembered, in that moment, how he’d said that to Nadia the night they first met, about the girlfriend before her.She was never well.

Nadia kept walking, her head spinning, with a dogged refusal to look back at him. She knew he was watching. Knew he was furious she’d caused even the tiniest bit of a scene.

Crazy, that was the word he had used, all that time ago. He said his ex was crazy. And now Nadia felt crazy too. And it was awful, horrible – she’d bet her whole life that the woman who was now hearing about his crazy ex would one day herself be crying in the street near a work party being called crazy by him too, when the only thing crazy was how Awful Ben picked away at the women he said he loved and tortured them into thinking there was something wrong with them.

But the problem washim.

It made Nadia want to scream. She wanted to scream,andrun back down the road to tell the woman to save herself and dump him now. But if she did that, she really would seem crazy. She wouldn’t have listened to anyone, least of all an ex, if she’d been warned. She would have thought that whoever tried to tell her not to pursue a relationship with him was jealous.That’s what they teach us, Nadia thought to herself, miserably.They teach us that other women are the competition so we don’t talk to each other honestly and figure out that they’re all fucking fuckers.

She reached the Sky Garden and looked up. There was no way she was going in. She was crying, she realized – and, as she fished her phone out of her pocket, trembling a little too. She called Emma.

‘Babe, where are you?’ answered Emma. ‘I’ve seen this guy Gaby has for you. He’s cute. He’s your type. Like, fucking game on, babe!’

Nadia’s voice wobbled as she said, ‘I’m outside. I just saw Ben.’ And then she sobbed hysterically.

‘Fuck. Okay. I’m coming. Stay right there. I’m coming.’

‘The table in the corner, please,’ Emma said to the hostess of the chic hotel. Emma had a theory that if in doubt, go to a hotel bar because they’re always emptier than pubs or stand-alone restaurants. She was right. Nadia felt safe here. It was half empty and they could sit at the back, out of the way, their own little world within a world.

Gaby was with them. The three settled into a corner booth and Emma ordered them the salted caramel chocolate brownie with two scoops of ice cream, the sweet and salty popcorn, and a large pot of peppermint tea with honey on the side. Everything was to share.

‘There was so much I thought I would say to him if I ever saw him again,’ Nadia said, playing with the label on the bottle of water at the table. ‘And I just froze. Urgh.’ A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘He looked so smug too – like he knew he’d caught me in a weak moment or something.’

‘What did she look like?’ Emma asked, intrigued.

‘Question vetoed,’ said Gaby, giving her daggers. ‘It literally doesn’t matter. He’ll do the same to her.’ Gaby had known something was off with Awful Ben almost immediately after Nadia had started going out with him; she and Nadia had had their only fight over it and after they’d made up Gaby knew she had to let her friend make her own mistakes. ‘It happens to a lot of women at some point.’

The tea arrived, and the women fell silent as the waitress unloaded her tray and told them dessert would be right with them.

‘You don’t have to be okay, you know,’ Gaby said, once she’d gone. ‘I’d want to cry and scream too.’

Nadia nodded. ‘I hate that you don’t get over someone like, once. You have to do it again and again and again, every time you think of them.’

‘You’ve been doing really well,’ Emma offered. ‘You’ve been lighter, happier. More positive. You’ve been in The New Routine to Change Your Life!’

‘And now I’m taking a huge leap back,’ Nadia said, miserably. ‘I’m so mad that he can control me! Still!’ She burst into tears again.

‘It’s not a leap back, not at all.’ Emma soothed her. ‘Babe – healing isn’t linear. And look how far you’ve come. You were able to process all that craziness that happened, and then tell us and process it again, and seeing him – it’s another way to process it. Because it was real. What he did to you, how awful he was – it was all real. I promise you: none of us is fucking up like we think we are.’

Nadia welled up again, and nodded. It was all she could do, nod, like an external manifestation of the internal realization that yup, he really had stolen not just the six months of her life that they’d dated, but the six months afterwards too, which she’d needed just to make sense of how she’d let it happen. How she’d become his victim. She was a strong, positive, go-getting woman and it shamed her deeply that she’d let a man put out her flame.

‘Stop it,’ said Emma. ‘I can see you beating yourself up again. None of this is your fault. It’s all him. You are a survivor, and he can’t hurt you anymore, okay? You control this ship.’

The dessert arrived, with three forks, and the women picked the edges off the brownie.

‘I’m going to order the cheesecake too,’ said Nadia, sadly.

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